might be a similar experience—but then I flashed back to the furor that had taken place three years earlier. Each one of us picketers had been separated and surrounded by angry mobs. Counterprotesters had dressed up as Jesus and the Easter bunny, screaming and chanting and hitting us with their signs while Long Beach police officers looked on and laughed. Two old women sporting sunglasses and sneers had found their way through the boisterous crowd and planted themselves directly behind me, each whispering lurid descriptions of sex into my ears—not as Gramps had done from the pulpit, referencing gays, but with me at the center of their sick fantasies. I was repulsed, wanted to bolt, but I couldn’t move because of the throng. I strained to lift my signs up above the melee and sang at the top of my lungs just to keep the words of the old women out of my ears.
The festival, I feared, would be a different experience entirely.
* * *
The ninth annual Jewlicious Festival was to take place in Long Beach, California, aboard the RMS Queen Mary, an ocean liner from the 1930s now retired and permanently docked in Queensway Bay. It was billed as a gathering of fifteen hundred Jewish students and young adults, who would come together for a three-day celebration of Jewish culture. I spent the first two days roaming from one conversation to the next with an endless stream of questions about Jewish history, food, music, and theology, but soon ran headlong into the original catalyst for the trip.
After lunch on Saturday, David led Grace and me into a grand banquet room for our public discussion. It had been relatively easy to endure the rejection of outsiders while I was at Westboro, surrounded by people who took the heat right alongside me—and who likewise believed that we were speaking God’s words, not our own. For I have not spoken of myself; but the Father which sent me, he gave me a commandment, what I should say, and what I should speak. But this—standing on my own two feet, accountable for my own thoughts and ideas, which were still in constant flux—this was panic-inducing. David took in my blank stare and shallow breath. “I’ll be right there with you,” he reassured me. “It’ll be okay.”
We took our seats at a cloth-covered table at the front of the room, which had been filled to capacity with rows of chairs lined up like a firing squad. Once those were taken, more people filled in the space at the edges of the room, crowding at the back before the doors were finally closed. The group was about 150 strong, crammed in close, waiting.
“Well!” David called out. “Welcome! Can you all hear me okay?” No amplification equipment on Shabbat, either. There were murmurs from the back. All good.
The room was impeccably silent as David directed the conversation. He returned to the earliest days of our relationship as frenemies on Twitter, offered probing questions about Westboro and its doctrines—especially as they related to Jewish people—and, finally, asked me to explain why we had left. I stared assiduously down at the white tablecloth as I spoke, at the beads of condensation dripping down the sides of my glass of ice water, at David’s face as he tried to gently coax the conversation forward. I did not dare to look across the table, which felt to me like a shield. The first row of chairs sat just on the other side of it, the closest faces only a few feet away.
Grace said little until David asked about leaving our family. I tried to be vague so as to avoid openly weeping, but she spoke up suddenly and passionately, until it felt like we were both drowning in it again.
“We’ll answer some questions in a minute,” David said, as Grace and I collected ourselves, “but the last thing I wanted to share is a revelation I had this week during my conversations with Megan and Grace. To be honest: I don’t know if I could do what they did. If I had been raised the way that they were raised, I would’ve been out there holding signs with Grandpa Phelps, too. If I was brought up in their family, would I have the strength of character and the moral fortitude to leave my family? To leave everything I’ve ever known?” He shook his head. “I want to say that I would have, but I don’t know.”